Monthly Archives: September 2015

Lea’s little sister had spent nine tenths of her life with her head tilted back, sedately keeping a watch on the stars. When they were little, it was all because of the comforting line that their father had used to describe their dead mother. He’d told Lea and Marie that their mother was in the stars now, watching them from above to make sure that they stayed safe. So Marie tilted her head back and smiled wide and tried to promise her mother that they were safe, all while looking for any hint of their mother smiling down on her.

Of course, there wasn’t one, because that wasn’t the way that the world actually worked. Their mother was dead and not smiling down on anyone. There would be no sign of her among the stars. But Marie did notice other things while she smiled up at the stars. She watched patterns and constellations and meteor storms and the whole universe changing overhead. And the more that she watched and saw, the more she wanted to learn and understand why. So, during her daylight hours she locked herself away in planetariums, libraries, university lecture halls, anywhere someone might be able to tell her what was happening out there, or even better any place that would give her the tools to figure it out for herself.

So Lea’s little sister spent so much of her life looking up at the stars. Why should it surprise anyone that she found something spectacular up there?

[This is a take two of a Legal Theft Project. This has the same first line as yesterday, but it’s a different story. Enjoy.)

The rage surging across her skin was probably making her stupid, funny how she didn’t care. Heidi let her feet carry her—against her better judgment, perhaps—around the counter, and she slapped the customer hard across the face.

Everything stood still. Clark, her co-worker on the floor, just gaped at her. The red-headed woman just stood there with Heidi’s handprint glowing on her cheek. Even Heidi herself was lost for words in the moment. But, then she found some words. “Get the fuck out of this store.”

Clark found some words too. “Heidi, you can’t—“but he was cut off by a single look from Heidi.

“You don’t know who this woman is,” she informed him sharply.

“No, but—“

“Then stay out of it, Clark!” Heidi returned her attention to the woman now rubbing at her cheek. “Why aren’t you leaving?”

“Heidi, please—Let me explain.” The redhead spoke softly an friendly enough, but Heidi was not having any of it.

“You need to leave. My brother’s protective order covers members of his household, and if you don’t leave right now. I will call the cops.”

“Heidi—I—“ Heidi reached over the counter and grabbed the store’s cordless phone. The red-head threw up her hands in surrender. “I’m going—I’m going. But this isn’t over.”

Heidi smiled for the first time since the woman came in. “Oh, but it is. Good bye.”

The woman watched Heidi’s finger hover over the dial pad, before hurrying out of the store. Heidi waited until the door completely shut behind her, before setting the phone back in it’s cradle and slinking back behind the counter to hid and hyperventilate a little.

Clark came over to stand near her. “What the hell was that?”

Heidi tried to take a deep breath and looked up at him. “Complicated. That is very complicated.”

The rage surging across her skin was probably making her stupid, funny how she didn’t care. People cleared out of her way as she walked down the hallways, and she wasn’t sure if that was because of her reputation proceeded her or if it was because she was giving off and actual aura of rage. When she got to his room, the door burst open before she could touch it, before she could have even thought the spell to unlock it.

Inside, Alun stood stock still. He looked calm, but Morrigan could tell that he was scared. Good, she thought to herself, he should be scared. “What the hell did you do to my brother?”

Alun stood up straight and looked her in the eye. She had to give him credit for having that kind of strength in spite of his fear. Not much credit, mind you, but credit nonetheless. “He knew what he was getting into. He listened to the terms and agreed his consent.”

“He’s a kid! A boy! Agreed or not, you should’ve have—“ Alun raised his and out of habit Morrigan stopped talking. After all, he had been her teacher once, and she was supposed to respect her teachers.

“He is twice as old now as you were when you took the same qualifications. He thought he was ready. He failed. If you are mad at anyone, you should be mad at him.”

She was too angry to listen to reason. She was too angry to remember her place. She was too angry to realize that she would have been—maybe not equally livid but still pretty angry if her brother hadn’t been allowed to take his test. But she wasn’t too angry to send out a wave of energy strong enough to make everyone in the room, and the next few rooms, feel very, very ill. Alun tried to remain stoic even as he clutched at his stomach. It didn’t work.

“Don’t you ever—ever—lay a finger on my brother again,” She whispered menacingly before turning on her heel and storming back into the hallway.12

Thunderheads battled their way past the mountains, rumbling with the promise of a drenching. Leanne froze in mid run, almost falling flat as she stumbled to a stop, turning to look towards the mountains with wide eyes. She earned herself a quick shove in the back from her cousin Archie. “Come on, city girl. We don’t have time for you to hide under the covers.”

“I wish you’d top calling me city girl,” Leanne complained over the wind, “I was born on this farm too, you know.”

“Yeah—then you proved yourself to be a genius and prodigy and went to school for ten years in the big city,” Archie spit back. He didn’t even sound out of breath from the run, and Leanne hated him a little bit for that. “So, city girl it is. Grab those last two doors quickly. We’ve still got a lot to do before drops start to fall.”

“I hate you,” Leanne called, slamming a door into place and latching it tightly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Archie laughed. “When it starts really coming down we can go inside and do some high level mathematics so you can feel superior again.”

Leanne wouldn’t dare say aloud how okay she was with that plan. After a morning of being bad at working on the farm, it would be a breath of fresh air to be good at math again.

At that point, sense, logic, and sanity abandoned ship. He was alive, and that was all that mattered.

“I want to see him,” I demanded.

“That’s not practical,” Missy began, but Frankie cut her off.

“No, it’s not practical or perhaps the best advised situation, but she’s been waiting in that chair for almost seventy-two hours straight. Do what you need to do to get her in there to see him.” Frankie insisted. I’d never been more grateful for anyone ever in my entire life.

Missy gave me a look like I would regret having Frankie step in for me—but I didn’t care. I was willing to pay any price to see with my own eyes that he was alive. Any price at all.

It took us the better part of two hours for me to be ready enough for Missy’s satisfaction. I had to be scrubbed and sanitized and specially dressed. But I took it all patiently. He was alive.

Finally, they let me in. I’d been warned that he wouldn’t look like he normally did, that with the injuries and swelling, and some of the work that they had to do to keep him alive—but I still didn’t care. He couldn’t sit up, or really smile, but he did raise a couple of fingers in hello.

Frankie reappeared, after being strangely absent during my scrubbing and sanitizing, and showed ushered me forward so I could take his unbound hand. “He can’t really talk,” She told me, but we’ve been working on blink once for yes, twice for no. It’s been working pretty well for us thus far.”

“Hey, sweetie,” I whispered, giving his hand a little squeeze. “You know who I am, right?”

He blinked once, and I was so glad that we at least still had that. “We’ll get through this, okay?”

They gleefully threw him, head first and screaming, into the heart of the volcano. In slow motion, they watched him tumble, spinning and yelling until he hit the red and yellow wall, and then the screen went gray and the bright blue “Game Over” took up most of their view.

Devon threw the game controller down on the couch and watched as it bounced off the pillow and fell to the ground. “You guys suck. I hate you all.”

Wendy laughed and stretched. “You bet that we couldn’t beat you in any way. You never said we had to play fair.”

“And strictly speaking, freezing your character and throwing him into the volcano is not against the rules,” Mary added.

“The ladies have an excellent point,” Dylan agreed.

Devon sighed and handed each of them a twenty-dollar bill. “Okay, fine. But I want a re-match, right here, right now, no volcanos.”

“Double or nothing?” Wendy prompted, looking at her twenty with a smile.

“Yeah. Easily. But no volcanos,” Devon repeated.

Mary, Wendy, and Dylan shared a look. Had Devon been a more observant man, he would have known there was a plan already in place. He was about to be a very broke man.

“Where is your human?” Liam looked up from his notebook and blinked silently at Jon. “Oh you know what I meant,” Jon muttered crankily.

“Is that what you call her? When I’m not around you call her my human?” Liam asked, closing the book carefully.

“Well, she lives with two witches, works for a psychic and is dating a werewolf—all with no discernible supernatural ability of her own. What are we supposed to call her?” Jon asked, fidgeting with something on the corner of the desk.

“Well, how about my girlfriend if we absolutely must refer to her in relation to me. Or, you know, in a strange twist of events we could call her Beth, you know, her name. Imagine that.” Liam was a little on edge today, which was never a good time to mess with Liam, let alone, piss him off.

Jon scratched at the back of his head and looked at Liam with a hint of desperation. “Beth knows we call her the human. She thinks it’s cute—and if I’m not mistaken she takes a point of pride that she doesn’t have any boost in the crazy world she’s deal with. I don’t know. You can fight that out with her later. Still, where is she? I have too much to do to sit here and argue with you.”

Liam considered Jon for a moment, before deciding that right now it would be a pointless argument, and convincing himself that it was just the moon pulling at his blood that made him want to fight this to the death. It was easier just to move on. “She’s in the back in her shed. Working on a stone project or something. To be honest the logistics went over my head.”

“Thank you,” Jon sighed, rubbing at an eye tiredly in relief that they weren’t going to have to fight, “and sorry, for what it’s worth.”

Liam made a small non-committal noise in the back of his throat, and turned back to his book. He didn’t look up see Jon make his way to the back of the house.